Sorry, you have no choice in the matter

And speaking of authoritarianism and bullying, remember the new Iranian penal code? I was having another look at it and I noticed something I hadn’t fully taken in before.

Article 225-5: Parental Apostate is one whose parents (both) had been non-Muslims at the time of conception, and who has become a Muslim after the age of maturity, and later leaves Islam and returns to blasphemy. Article 225-6: If someone has at least one Muslim parent at the time of conception but after the age of maturity, without pretending to be a Muslim, chooses blasphemy is considered a Parental Apostate.

Look closely at 225:6. If you have one Muslim parent at the time of conception, and then when you grow up, without ever actually being a Muslim, calling yourself a Muslim, declaring yourself to be a Muslim, thinking of yourself as a Muslim – you then choose to be not a Muslim – you are considered a Parental Apostate, for which the penalty is death. So two people you don’t know have sex; one of them is a Muslim; you are conceived as a result of that sex act; you’re a Muslim, and you can’t not be a Muslim or we’ll kill you.

When I saw the phrase “teapot worship” I thought it must be an allusion to “Russell’s teapot,” and the way in which every religious believer is engaged in one or another form of exactly such “teapot worship.”

Alas, it was meant to be taken literally.

Richard Dawkins, commenting on the hostility-meriting effects of organized religion versus Russell’s relatively innocuous teapot, said: “Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don’t exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don’t stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don’t warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don’t kneecap those who put the tea in first.”

And yet, in Malaysia today … one can only hope that they’re all putting the milk in first, to “keep the peace.”

I think it is interesting that the only Muslims whose lives are of importance to you are those who reject Islam. Anyone reading this website would be ignorant of the deaths of over a million Muslims in Iraq at the hands of the secular West.

‘At the hands of the secular West is it. It’s not at the hands of other Muslims? Are you sure about that?’

Yes I am, the vast majority of the deaths are due to sanctions and warfare carried out by the USA and the UK. For you to try to blame the victims is frankly disgusting. I’m an atheist, but people like you and Christopher Hitchens give atheism a bad name.